Free Dreams by Richard A. Lupoff Page B

who's so crazy in love he can't figure out which way is up.

    ***

    For the next couple of weeks I managed to avoid Vampirella. I started getting up early, showering and shaving regularly, working long hours, even freelancing to supplement the meager salary that the East Coast mobsters who owned Rock! Rock! Rock! paid me whenever I called up and whined that I was starving.
    I got an invitation to a literary conference in Southern California. A library association had decided that the popular music press was worthy of a panel discussion and offered me a cheap ticket on a PSA jet, a rental AMC Gremlin, and a room at the Motel Five-and-a-Half directly under the LAX flight-path.
    Strangely enough, by the time my jet touched down I had a hearty appetite so I headed out in my Gremlin, looking for a place to eat. I must have taken a wrong turn on the Hades Freeway because I wound up in an ugly town in the Valley. While I tried to find my way back to LA I spotted an eating establishment with the unlikely name of Uncle Hoggly-Woggly's Tyler Texas Home Style Barbecue. There was a big sign over the door, a painting of a bright pink pig in a chef's hat holding up a plate of barbecue and saying, "Bet You Can't Top This!" surrounded by the name of the establishment in glowing incandescent letters. People were lined up to get into the joint and the ones going in looked happy and the ones coming out looked happier so I figured this was a find.
    It was. If I ever get to Texas—God forbid!—I will head straight to Tyler, wherever that may be, and wallow in barbecue until I can't stand it any more.
    For now, though, I just feasted on ribs in sauce so hot it hurt but so delicious I couldn't stop eating, and potato salad, and coffee. That was all that Uncle Hoggly-Woggly sold and it was paradise enow as far as I was concerned.
    That was the high point of my trip. As for the low point . . .
    The conference was a nightmare. My panel was attended by about three bedraggled-looking spinster librarians. Turned out that everybody else was at a cocktail party in honor of the hundredth birthday a professor of medieval ballades from some local community college extension branch. The moderator of the panel must have been that professor's mother. She thought my magazine was a journal devoted to the study of petroglyphs. And my fellow panelists—there were two of them—were none other than my old buddies Frankie and Jimmy Kerr. Who of course proceeded to beat up on me verbally for forty minutes while our moderator sat there, open-mouthed and horror-stricken.
    I spent the evening sitting on my bed at the Motel Five-and-a-Half eating a stale chicken salad sandwich, drinking warm, flat beer, and watching The Brady Bunch in fuzzy black-and-white. I would have headed back to Uncle Hoggly-Woggly's if I thought I could find it again, but the first time had been strictly a lucky strike and I wasn't going to risk those freeways again.
    In the morning I packed my minimal luggage, checked out of the Motel Five-and-a-Half, and started across the parking lot, looking for my avocado green Gremlin.
    Other people were checking out. I saw a woman pushing a double-width stroller from the office. As she reached the middle of the parking lot some kind of muscle car came screaming around the corner, headed straight for them. I don't think the driver expected anyone to be there and he mashed on his brakes and the car started to skid but there was no way it was going to stop in time and no way that poor mother was going to get her little ones out of its trajectory.
    I want to emphasize, I'm no hero. I didn't decide that I was going to do what I did. I didn't even think about that, When you see somebody who needs help, business. I just—well, something clicked in my brain, and without thinking I launched myself into a flying tackle, slammed into the woman with my shoulder, grabbed the handle of the stroller with my other hand and yanked it after me. I hit the pavement hard with